COLLISION COURSE
Wolverines’ flop, Henry’s heroics set up two big games
He didn’t want to lose. Not now. Not here. Not with the NCAA tournament steak on the line, with the season on the line, really.
Aaron Henry played like it down the stretch Tuesday night in East Lansing, pushing Michigan State basketball to a 64-58 win over Indiana.
It began when Henry hit a 3-pointer with two minutes left, with the ball rolling over the front of the rim. A shooter’s roll?
Sure, why not?
Everyone deserves a friendly cliche once in a while. Especially someone like Henry, who has played well all season. Especially someone who scored 10 straight points to ice the game, who secured a steal, grabbed a rebound, ran the point, hit free throws and passed out towels to his teammates on the bench.
Ok, maybe not that last part. But he did everything else, including keep MSU on the tournament bubble damn near by himself.
It felt like it, anyway. MSU was that bad for much of the night.
The Spartans had little juice and no legs and no flow. They had fight, though. And that’s all Tom Izzo could ask.
Survive and advance, no matter how ugly. It’s been his mantra for more than two decades. And Tuesday night was ugly
Down in Ann Arbor, inside Crisler Center, it wasn’t much prettier, unless you’re an Illinois fan (in which case the game was beautiful). The Illini — despite missing their best player,
Ayo Dosunmu, who suffered a facial injury last week against MSU — demolished the Wolverines.
The game was U-M's first chance to clinch the Big Ten title, and while a couple of players admitted pressure might have gotten in the way, they swear they were focused before the tip. Perhaps they were.
They just weren’t ready for the Illini’s speed and defensive pressure.
“They hit us,” said Isaiah Livers, U-M's senior forward. “We weren’t ready. We were being aggressive, but we were taking some … some un-Michigan-like shots out of us. (We) never found our rhythm.”
The Wolverines hadn’t lost in more than a month. But at least when they did back then, at Minnesota back in January, they could point to the absence of their defensive leader — Eli Brooks.
This was different. U-M was whole, at home, on a roll, having brushed off all challenges, often easily.
Whether it was the natural letdown of finding out less than an hour before the tip that Dosunmu wasn’t going to play — coach Juwan Howard said his team had prepped as if he would — or whether it was the high stakes, U-M looked out of sorts all night.
Howard didn’t think his team competed. Not really.
“The type of performance we gave tonight was not acceptable,” he said. “I call it a horror film.”
His team was due for a night like this, truthfully. Maybe not "falling behind by 28 and losing by 22" due, but the Wolverines had played at such a high level for so long, it was inevitable.
U-M can win the Big Ten with a victory over
MSU either Thursday night or Sunday afternoon.
The Spartans, meanwhile, can likely lock up a tournament spot with a win either Thursday or Sunday. It will take a lot more than what they showed against Indiana.
But they are capable. They proved it last week by knocking off the team that throttled U-M on Tuesday.
Not that college basketball is about transitive properties.
Instead, it’s about adjusting to a hungry and aggressive opponent, as U-M did not for the first time all season. And it’s about finding a way to make a shot in a game when no one can. Henry did that.
The Wolverines did not.